This invention relates generally to networked environments in which communities of interest engage and interact, and more particularly to a method of monitoring and encouraging continued engagement and interaction.
Networked environments, ranging from the early bulletin board systems (BBS) to the current day Intranets and the Internet, have engendered a number of different media for novel forms of social interaction. These media forms include news groups, chat groups (e.g., Internet Relay Chat or IRC), multi-user domains (MUD) and MUD object oriented (MOO), other kinds of on-line multi-user games, as well as distribution lists and mailing lists. What all of these forms have in common is the potential for breeding communities from collections of people who may initially be complete strangers to each other. The dynamics of community creation and evolution is fascinating and seems to depend less on the medium of communication and the initial common interest that drives its members to contribute than on other factors, such as the size of the community, the xe2x80x9cnetiquettexe2x80x9d the members follow, their tolerance, and perhaps most importantly, the range of interests they share, both on-line and off-line.
A relatively new medium for community formation and community support is the recommender system in which users share recommendations around common items of interest. Automatic recommender systems provide personalized recommendations for each user by filtering the recommendations in a way that takes into account each user""s revealed preferences. Glance, N., Arregui, D. and Dardenne, M. xe2x80x9cKnowledge Pump: Supporting the Flow and Use of Knowledge,xe2x80x9d Information Technology for Knowledge Management. Eds. U. Borghoff and R. Pareschi, New York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 35-45, 1998 and Glance, N., Arregui, D. and Dardenne, M. xe2x80x9cMaking Recommender Systems Work for Organizations,xe2x80x9d Proceedings of PAAMxe2x80x299, London, UK, Apr. 19-21, 1999, focus on the particular role recommender systems can play in supporting communities of professionals in the workplace.
In the commercial sector, on-line merchants have created groups of customers who share common interests in the goods and services offered by the on-line merchant. Some merchants include recommender systems to provide suggestions to their customers. While such customers may not interact with each other directly, such groups of customers interact with the merchant in similar ways and can be considered a community.
A problem with on-line communities is maintaining the level of interaction over the community""s life cycle. The life cycle of a community can be characterized by many different properties. For example, independent of the medium of communication and its initial purpose (play, work, shop, domain of interest), the communities that form can exhibit anything from strong, enduring relationships to weak, ephemeral ones. Communities can have low or high turnover, a long or short life span.
In an on-line community, member presence mandates active participation and almost precludes passive participation (unlike co-located communities where only hermits escape some amount of interaction). Lurkers, or people who visit a community location without participating, observe but are not considered present in the community (and thus not a member). In the life cycle of an on-line community, it is likely that there will be fluctuations in the overall amount of interaction taking place in the community as well as across different individuals. At some time in the life cycle of the community, the activity level or amount of interaction within the community may drop to a very low level (or even zero). In such cases, the community may be only sleeping or it may be dying.
In commercial applications, the life cycle of an on-line merchant""s community, such as travel agencies, airline mileage programs, stock traders and other general retail merchants, can similarly vary. Such merchants need ways of reinvigorating their communities of customers or else they will go out of business (their community will eventually die).
There are two main reasons why the amount of interaction within a community may drop causing the community to sleep or eventually to die. The first reason is that the community does not correspond to a real community anymore. In some communities, it may happen that the center of interest is no longer pertinent and no other common interests remain to bind the group together. The community has been created as a result of an emerging interest, but without a consolidated basis, then after a short period the community members redirect their interest elsewhere. In other communities, it may happen that all information of interest has been shared, at least for the time being.
The second reason is that the community is xe2x80x9csleeping,xe2x80x9d that is the community still retains a strong center of interest, but something has caused the community activity to decrease demonstrably. Sleeping can occur for different reasons. For example, a set of circumstances may have triggered a chain reaction causing the community members to collectively become lazy. Perhaps the members"" interest has decreased in the original center of interest, but the members still retain other common interests. Or, due to randomly coincident reasons, most members are mostly inactive at the same time.
Assume for example, the community is only sleeping. Perhaps some members of the community have, for random reasons, not been active for a while. Then, other members of the community start feeling that the community is not very active anymore and are discouraged from actively participating in it. In addition, some of the members may feel that their credibility is at risk if they submit to a community that nobody seems to be interested in anymore. These reactions may then spread back to the initial set of randomly inactive members. A pernicious negative feedback loop is thus set in place, potentially for ill-founded reasons, with the end result being a sleeping community.
If a community has no center of interest to bind the group together, then it is likely that no recovery mechanism can reawaken the community. In the worst case the community may die. It can also die if it is left to sleep too long. If the community is only sleeping, it will awaken when a new topic of interest occurs. If no action is taken (e.g., no new topic or event occurs to stimulate the community) when a community is sleeping, the community may eventually die.
The method of the invention overcomes the problems in a community when the amount of interaction drops off through the use of xe2x80x9ccommunity crickets.xe2x80x9d A community cricket monitors the amount of community activity, establishes criteria for deciding when a community is sleeping and uses that criteria for initiating a recovery mechanism for xe2x80x9cre-awakeningxe2x80x9d the community. A community is xe2x80x9csleepingxe2x80x9d if the level of activity falls below some predetermined level or criteria. An activity coefficient that represents a measure of the community""s activity level is defined for each community. When the activity coefficient reaches or falls below a critical activity threshold (established by a community administrator or derived from a model of the dynamics of the community), the community cricket initiates a recovery mechanism. Alternatively, the community cricket can monitor the time period that community activity is below the critical threshold. If activity stays below the critical level for a predetermined period of time, the community cricket then initiates a recovery mechanism. By monitoring the community""s activity and initiating appropriate activity, the community cricket can prevent sleeping communities from dying.
Generally, the community cricket is active only when the community activity falls below a critical threshold. When a community cricket initiates activity, such as by providing a recommendation, such a recommendation will generally not be as high quality as recommendations coming from a human member of the community. When the community is active, then only recommendations from human members of the community will be received. In one embodiment of the invention, the cricket remains quiet unless it deems that the community is sleeping, at which point it awakens and instantiates the recovery mechanism. In an alternative embodiment, the community cricket tunes its level of activity to the amount of activity it observes in the community. It may have a bi-phasal mode of activity (on-off, as before, or low/high), or a continuous set of modes (inversely proportional to observed amount of activity).